Chris Howard loads fuel tanks Monday at a Costco store in Matthews, N.C. Oil prices surged past $143 a barrel for the first time ever Monday, and the price for a gallon of gas hit a new all-time high in the United States.

WASHINGTON — Four-dollar gasoline has stolen a beach vacation from Julie Jacobs’ family, “little small luxuries” like exotic bath washes from Angela Crawford and dinners out from folks all over the country. Phil English sold his beloved but fuel-guzzling red pickup.

Like a plague that hits every economic class, race and age, soaring fuel prices are inflicting pain throughout the United States. Nine in 10 people are expecting the ballooning costs to squeeze them financially over the next half-year, says an Associated Press-Yahoo News poll released Monday.

Nearly half think that hardship will be serious. To cope, most are driving less, easing off the air conditioning and heating at home and cutting corners elsewhere. Half are curtailing vacation plans; nearly as many are considering buying cars that burn less gas.

U.S. auto companies are closing plants that make pickups and sport utility vehicles that people have stopped buying. As the price of gasoline has spiraled upward, so, too, has the public’s ire.

Two-thirds consider gas prices an extremely important issue, edging the economy and outpacing health care and Iraq as the country’s most distressing problem. In November, when gas cost about $1 a gallon less than today, just under half rated it extremely important.

“Do you think there’s an end in sight? I don’t,” the 33-year-old Crawford, a Dallas homemaker, said.

She said switching to bar soap from a favored lotion is one of many “little small luxuries” she has given up, along with fewer restaurant meals and new clothes. She also has talked with her husband, a flooring contractor, about finding a job involving less long-distance driving with his heavy van.

“It’s depressing, and it makes you nervous,” she said.

The AP-Yahoo News poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks, has tracked the same 2,000 people since last fall to see how their views change during the presidential campaign. The latest survey shows how the price of gasoline has caught or eclipsed every other issue, not just as a political topic but as a problem in people’s lives.

Four in 10 people in families earning $50,000 to $100,000 annually, and one in six earning more than that, expect serious financial hardships from rising gas costs, as do one in three college graduates.

Many lower-earning families are responding by easing their use of air conditioning and heating, trimming vacation plans and cutting other spending. But higher-income people are not far behind.

Jacobs, a homemaker and mother of three in Baltimore, said gas costs forced her to turn down two summer trips — a cousin’s wedding in North Carolina and a vacation with her parents in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Some have already taken that step. English of Papillion, Neb., sold his 1998 Ford pickup, which got about 13 miles per gallon, for a more fuel-efficient convertible.

“It was a nice truck,” said English, 43, an aircraft mechanic. “It didn’t feel good” to get rid of it “and it still doesn’t,” he said.

Using data from the Dartmouth Atlas – a source of information and analytics that organizes Medicare data by a variety of indicators linked to medical resource use – we recently ranked geographic areas based on markers of end-of-life care quality, including deaths in the hospital and number of physicians seen in the last year of life.